Signal conditioning
In electronics and signal processing, signal conditioning is the manipulation of an analog signal in such a way that it meets the requirements of the next stage for further processing.
In an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) application, signal conditioning includes voltage or current limiting and anti-aliasing filtering.
In control engineering applications, it is common to have a sensing stage (which consists of a sensor), a signal conditioning stage (where usually amplification of the signal is done) and a processing stage (often carried out by an ADC and a micro-controller). Operational amplifiers (op-amps) are commonly employed to carry out the amplification of the signal in the signal conditioning stage. In some transducers, signal conditioning is integrated with the sensor, for example in Hall-effect sensors.
In power electronics, before processing the input sensed signals by sensors like voltage sensor and current sensor, signal conditioning scales signals to level acceptable to the microprocessor.